Chez Jolie Coiffure

Hair can be many things to many people, but in Rosine Mbakam’s elegant, warmhearted documentary it makes up the strands that tie the West African customers and staff of one small Brussels hair salon to one another and to their homeland. The store’s and the film’s heart is salon owner Sabine, a Cameroonian immigrant, surrogate mother and sister, community protector, lioness and confidant, weaving a safe space out of every trim and braid. Mkabam is “an original filmmaker of exquisite sensibility . . . one of the foremost filmmakers of creative nonfiction working right now” (Richard Brody, New Yorker).